Customer Reviews

The Value-Added Employee, Second Edition: 31 Competencies to Make Yourself Irresistible to Any Company

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The Value-Added Employee contains some excellent tools to help create specific development plans for people at all levels. The book provides the reader with an understanding of "competencies" and job competency models, concepts that have become popular in recent years with many corporations. Thirty-one competencies are featured, organized into three clear groupings: competencies that are related to working with people, business-related competencies and self-management competencies. As a manager, I partcularly appreciated the suggestions on how I can help develop or strengthen the competency for those I coach. This is a practical book, more like a workbook than a traditional book. HR departments will also find it helpful.

This is an outstanding book. It helped me analyze my strengths and the areas I need to work on to get ahead. Most self-help books are too academic or "motivational". This book seems to reflect what real live corporations are looking for. The writers apparently are not egghead psychologists, but are common sense business people who have successfully implemented competency development systems in major companies. The simple, practical tools for self assessment and career planning included in the book are great. I'm surprised that more organizations haven't adopted this approach. Other non-management employees like myself who are trying to better ourselves would certainly appreciate it.

The authors suggest "31 skills to make yourself irresistible to any company" and the 31 are indeed important skills to have mastered. If for whatever reasons you are not now currently "irresistible" to your employer, I strongly urge you to purchase, absorb, and digest this book's excellent content. There are others who will also derive substantial benefit from this book: Those in larger organizations who recruit and hire and/or who have supervisory responsibility for others, those launching a new company who can ill afford to make a mistake when hiring a key person, and those now entering the job market who wish to increase and enhance their appeal to prospective employers. In essence, if employees do not add value, they have no value.

I used this book as a supplemental textbook on leadership development for a master's course I taught overseas. Students loved it because of the clarity and usefulness of the charts in designing training modules, developing surveys, and assessing leadership in their organizations. They liked this book because of it's practicality better than some of the most popular authors on leadership.